About Tallebudgera Plumbing & Gas

Tallebudgera Plumbing & Gas started in 2013 out of a single ute parked behind a unit block in Burleigh Waters. Dane had spent nine years on new-build sites from Robina out to Reedy Creek, roughing in bathroom after bathroom, and he was good at it. What kept bothering him were the calls from people who had already had someone out twice for the same drip. Nobody was being paid to find the cause. They were being paid to make the noise stop for a fortnight.

The turning point was a job in Palm Beach in the second winter. A retired couple had paid three different blokes to look at a wet patch in the laundry, and every one of them had replaced a different washer. Dane spent two hours with a listening stick and a pressure gauge before he picked up a tool, and found a pinhole in a copper run inside the wall cavity, about a metre from where anyone had been looking. The repair cost them less than the three visits before it. That is when we wrote the rule we still work to: nothing gets replaced until we can say why it failed.

We are based in Burleigh Heads because that is where most of the work already was, and because the housing stock here is a genuine mix. There are brick and tile homes on the western side still running their original copper. There are apartment blocks along the highway with shared risers and a body corporate to talk to. There are new builds out in Varsity Lakes and Reedy Creek on PEX and manifolds. You cannot bring one method to all of that. You have to look first.

There are four of us now. Dane and Sam run the two vans and hold QBCC plumbing and drainage licences and Queensland gas work licences. Kate takes the calls, books the days and chases the parts warranties so nobody else has to. Toby is in his third year of his apprenticeship and does most of the drain camera work, which he is better at than either of the licensed blokes.

We quote before we start, every time, including the emergency jobs. If the cause is behind a wall and we honestly cannot price the repair yet, we quote the investigation, tell you what we expect to find, and stop for your call before we go further. We have done a bit under ten thousand jobs since 2013. The number we actually watch is how often we have to come back, which has stayed under two percent for the last three years. That only happens if you find the cause first.